I also knew that late morning and early afternoon hours in Zion could be very crowded and, in general, I am not very fond of people in my landscapes. Instead of unapologetically removing them from my reality in Photoshop, I decided to beat the crowd and start the hike as early as possible.

I was on the very first park’s shuttle bus in the early morning as I started my hike in a very comfortable cool temperature with absolutely no people around.

In the beginning, it was a steep but very comfortable hike, with amazing open views and plenty of room to setup a tripod.

The last half-mile of the Angels Landing hike became a bit extreme. I had to pack my tripod and climb with the camera hanging around my neck. That was the moment when I really appreciated the switch from DSLR to mirrorless.

For some reason, the hiking down was less uncomfortable than going up.

Shooting

Once again, after analyzing the scene I could see the very bright area of the sky and the deep shadows at the bottom of the canyon. To shoot for HDR was the obvious choice.

I took 3 bracketed shots (-1, 0, +1) on a tripod.

Processing

I keep experimenting with Lightroom 6 new feature – HDR Merge. I like that Lightroom produces an HDR file in DNG format which is relatively small. I also appreciate that Lightroom adds “HDR” to the name of the newly created DNG file.

Awesome as always. It seems to do a very nice job the new hdr plugin in LR6! Till now I haven’t tried yet to do hdr shoots since I have no tripod and no auto bracketing on my d3200, but I’ll try it however with manual bracketing and post processing align, soon. Thanks Viktor for sharing all this beauty!

Roby, it was easy shot from the focusing perspective. I was shooting at 10mm and aperture F/7.1 so DOF (depth of field) was from 0.5m to infinity. I did not even bother to use manual focus, AF was good enough.

So it’s not that true what the web talks about 1/3 focusing rule on landscapes? I’m asking this to you because I’ve found that following that rule with my D3200 plus 18-55 lens has always resulted in a slightly blurry background even with small apertures like f/11 or f/16 and even following hyperfocal distance rule, whilst focusing on distant objects in the background always give me sharper photos from the foreground to the background. Cheers

when I use manual focus and I do not have a specific object to focus on (wide landscapes for example) I always use 1/3 rule. It works. And if you use such a small aperture (f/16) auto focus works pretty much always.

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